Quotes By Steve Lacy

I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here.

We played for peanuts. But we did what we wanted to do, we heard what we wanted to hear, we performed what we wanted to perform, we learned what we wanted to learn.

The soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano.

Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work.

Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same.

You have to sound sad first of all, then maybe later you can sound good.

I've been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It's up to you, the only limit is the imagination.

Bamboo is not a weed, it's a flowering plant. Bamboo is a magnificent plant.

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

The more original something is, the more of a threat it seems until the people catch up with it. That happened with Thelonious Monk. It happened with anybody who is really original.

People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world.

I've performed solo for 20 years now, but I don't do much of it, because if you only play alone, you go crazy and out of tune and play foolish music.

I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.

They call me before they go into production, when they have a prototype, and they call legitimate saxophonists, too. As opposed to the other kind.

I wanted to be a pianist but it just wasn't my thing. I guess I wanted to stand up rather than sit down.

When I first started playing music in 1955, there was just a small body of people that knew it. It was a very esoteric type of thing.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

Nobody was playing the soprano saxophone and certainly nobody was trying to do anything with it. So I was all alone. I didn't know that at first.

Register is very important. Music sounds best in a certain register.

I think it is in collaboration that the nature of art is revealed.

Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo.

The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music.

You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use.

What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now.

Kenny G, I have to be grateful to him for proving that the instrument can be played all different kinds of ways.

You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others.

If you listen to Louis Armstrong from 1929, you will never hear anything better than that really, and you will never hear anything more free than that.